


My Hands For Yours

by ivanolix



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Canon - TV, Canon Compliant, Canon Het Relationship, Established Relationship, F/M, Hospital, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Married Couple, Season/Series 03, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-01
Updated: 2010-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 21:56:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivanolix/pseuds/ivanolix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Instinct’s all that Kara can follow above and beyond medication and pain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Hands For Yours

**Author's Note:**

> This is brought to you by, uh, my brain’s opinion that excruciating pain and pain meds and passing out in hospitals are things that should be relived through Kara.

With every breath, Kara prepared to fall off the precipice, but instead she just wavered and lingered and swayed. She could feel the morpha lifting her higher, bringing her down, holding her floating in that empty place between sky and valley, between bliss and torment. Dee was bringing the Raptor into Galactica’s bay, and Kara felt just on the edge of falling apart...but she hadn’t yet. Her heart pumped fast just in case, and she cursed the ancestors of all flammable Raptor controls.

“Thank the gods,” Dee whispered to the windshield as the Raptor touched the deck, pulling back her hands as if now they could tremble safely.

Kara wasn’t sure whether to close her eyes or keep them open, the light feeling in her stomach and the heavy feeling of her bandaged hands making her mind threaten to spin dizzily. She swallowed and leaned forward.

“Come on,” Dee murmured, climbing out of her seat and reaching across to help Kara.

Teeth gritted, Kara managed to find her footing with Dee’s arm low across her back, and her focus was on getting the frak out of this godsforsaken Raptor. Her pulse was too shallow, too quick, and she stumbled at the door before a marine came over to help her down. She couldn’t even think clearly enough to hate needing his help.

But when her feet hit the deck and she didn’t collapse, when she was alive and home, the adrenaline rushed back into her system and she had the strength to walk. Her eyesight cleared and focused as she took a few steps forward unaided, almost Starbuck once more.

So when she looked beyond the deck in front of her and saw the stricken face of her husband, thinking was out of the question. Rejection, acceptance, indifference, none of it made it past the cocktail of fatigue and pain and chemicals both natural and artificial. Only instinct remained.

Sam ran across the hangar bay to scoop her in his arms, and Kara just held on with all the strength she had left. Her limbs were tight with the need to run or fight, but instead she just clung to him. He buried his face in her neck and the tension broke, and her eyes burned with tears as he turned her around in a cradling embrace.

“Gods, you’re alive,” he whispered against her, voice cracked.

Eyes blinking, breath coming fast as she struggled to relax, she tried to look up into his face. But it was too much, and she had to swallow sharply. Sam brushed his forehead against hers, then crushed her to him and rested his cheek in her hair. Kara’s knees buckled, the stress and panic too much, and she could feel her mind drifting as she held onto him.

Her eyes blurred as she looked off, saw fuzzy shapes of other people. She still couldn’t think. She was so tired, and the adrenaline was draining away the longer Sam held her, as if once again he was attracting her damages and absorbing them. Kara still wavered on the edge of the precipice where pain threatened to drag her down, but Sam was a safety net.

She closed her eyes and didn’t think.

“Cottle,” Sam said after a moment, still swaying her in his arms. He cleared his throat to say it more clearly. “Kara, you need to get to Cottle.”

Kara breathed, opening her eyes, dragged back farther from the edge with each word. “No, I thought I’d skip that,” she whispered croakingly. Her hands fell from resting on his shoulders, and the free-fall sent pain jolting back through her. She grimaced, and he didn’t need to be told more than that.

Hissing in breaths, Kara started walking out of the hangar bay when Sam shifted to her side. Her feet were getting too heavy to lift, but Sam moved slowly, stooping to keep his arm around her waist. He was quiet, close but not...she couldn’t think enough to tell. But he wasn’t scooping her up in his arms to carry her the rest of the way and telling her over and over that it was going to be all right—and that lack felt right.

Kara managed to push herself down the halls to the infirmary, despite her knees shaking, despite her eyes losing focus. “Gods frak everything!” she cursed, voice taut, and she fought not to clench her hands that were already becoming red-hot with biting pain again.

Sam said nothing, just kept his hand round her waist.

Cottle stood waiting, cigarette dangling from his mouth, hand tapping his thigh. “Dualla called ahead,” he said to no one in particular, as Sam moved Kara the last few steps in, and Cottle pulled aside the nearest curtain.

The hospital bed was there as Kara tried to sit without collapsing. Her head fell heavily back onto the pillow, bandaged hands curling in towards her chest as Sam’s hand left her waist. World spinning, her shaky exhale took with it the last of her adrenaline-induced strength.

“Burnt hands the only thing?” Cottle asked pointedly, pulling the curtain half around himself and Sam and the bed.

“Aren’t they enough?” Kara asked, seeing the burn kit arranged and Cottle’s grave face.

“Last morpha shot?” he asked, coming to her side and unbuckling her flight-suit. “You, Anders, help with this.”

“Half—” The word caught in Kara’s throat, and her eyelids fell for a second. “Half-hour ago, second dose.” Her body had felt weightless, except for her hands, but now as Sam helped Cottle slip the flight-suit from her shoulders, she could feel her fatigue-shaken muscles plainly again. She gave an involuntary shiver as they pulled the leather down her back and her arms.

The pain was coming back, her eyes stinging. “Doc, I need a shot,” she managed.

“This first,” Cottle grunted, taking shears to the mess of good rubber and burnt at her wrists.

Kara swallowed, and in the silence when all she could hear was the shifting squeak of rubber, her first real thought was noticing that Sam hadn’t said anything yet. Why hadn’t?...why...never mind. Thinking about the planet made her stomach churn with a half dozen separate memories, none of them good. Her jaw tightened.

They finally had her free of the suit, her tanks and pants sweaty but free of injury, her hands a mess. Just looking at them made her breath catch in her throat, and she tried to demand a shot again. But before the first syllable came strangled from her throat, her stomach overturned and her back curved.

Cottle was nothing if not experienced, and had a metal bowl under her chin before she’d hurled. Stomach heaving achingly, Kara lost what little contents it had into the bowl, body trembling.

“Hold this,” Cottle ordered Sam.

Kara’s eyes leaked tears while her body convulsed, and she felt Sam’s hand rest between her shoulder-blades as the last dry heaves took her. “Gods,” she murmured, head falling back to the pillow again, ordering her body to be done rebelling for now.

She could feel Cottle doing something down at her hands, but Sam brought a cool wet rag to her mouth, and she leaned into it with weary gratitude. She could feel sweat droplets on her brow, but felt clammy everywhere except the overwhelming heat centered in her hands. Cottle pulled at one of the cotton bandages, and Kara winced, breath hissing past her teeth.

“Doc, I need—” she started to demand, voice quavering, when suddenly his hand brushed accidentally against hers. The pain clouded her vision, and she jerked back, about to curse when the jabbing white darts of pain overwhelmed her mind. She fell back against the bed, feeling the world spinning away.

“Doc?” Sam’s voice sounded suddenly tight with worry.

As the world went dark, she heard something about “should have expected” and “better for her”, but the pain was taking her into oblivion too fast for her to know for sure.

She blacked out and lost track of everything.

Kara came to slowly, mind hazy with drugs again, body heavy against the bed. She could feel soft covers pulled up to her waist and she couldn’t feel her hands at all. Her heart throbbed at a steady beat, and slowly her eyes flickered open, the light bright but not too bright.

Her mouth tasted stale as she remembered passing out here, who knew how long before. She squinted up into the light, frowning, still feeling weary and not sure what was supposed to happen next. Fear gripped her for a second as she looked down, but her hands were neatly bound in white gauze and resting gently on her stomach, and that seemed like a good thing.

Then, before she could try to think again, she saw a dark head resting next to her hips. She could see the top of the tattoo on his arm, but didn’t really need it for identification. Sam slept soundly, fallen over from his chair to let his head collapse on her bed.

Everything came rushing back into Kara’s head, and she choked in a breath, hating herself now that she could think again. And wanting to fall back into oblivion until she could wake when nothing and no one would be waiting. She had to breathe in sharply to hold back the emotion that trauma was making vulnerable and near the surface.

Sam’s head rose at the sound, and Kara looked up into the light and blinked fiercely. “Doc managed to keep the pain from killing me,” she said, a little raspy. “I can handle the rest.” _Now go, please, Sam._

“Kara,” he said quietly, the low tone drawing in her gaze as if she couldn’t help herself. He was looking up at her with dark eyes lined with regret and worry, full of conflict. But something like love was shining through even all that mess, and she wanted to turn away but couldn’t, just met his gaze with her tired one. “Cottle says the next few weeks will be hell.”

Kara’s mouth tightened with her brief surprise. “Not my first time hearing that,” she said, too worn to manage anything else.

“With your hands?” Sam met her gaze closely, questioningly.

Kara let out a long breath and closed her eyes for a second. “Frak.”

“It’s not complicated, though,” Sam added. Kara felt his hand brush against her arm, and her eyes opened and dropped, saw his fingers gingerly touch her. “I told Cottle I’d be your hands when you needed them, and that’s exactly what I meant. Okay?”

Kara looked up to his face again, and hated the drugs that made a painful lump settle in her throat. He wasn’t even making a light comment in an attempt to change the mood, and she hated herself for so many things, but most right now for appreciating the quiet honesty. “Yeah,” she said just above a whisper, with a firm nod as her brow creased. But she swallowed and the lump in her throat faded.

She hadn’t noticed the tension in his face before, but she watched it melt away a little now. His thumb stroked her forearm before he withdrew his hand and nodded. “Tired, right?” he asked after taking a deep breath.

Kara let her eyes fall shut again and nodded wordlessly. She heard him shift in his seat, and wondered for a moment if he was leaning in to kiss her forehead—she feared how far she might give in if he did. But he was keeping his word as always, and he was just going to be her support, her hands, for this. Everything else would only start mattering once this was done. It was a relief and a disappointment when she heard him stand up and exhale slowly.

Eyes wearily closed, Kara breathed in deeply and settled back into the feeling of survival.

Yet it couldn’t just end like that. “Gods only know how relieved I am that you’re alive,” Sam’s earnest words came softly to her ears from where he stood, sounding on the verge of breaking.

Kara had to squeeze her eyes shut until she’d heard his departing footsteps at last, and then she could let out her breath, cursing the pain meds that sent emotion stinging to her eyes. The soft aching in her chest would go away soon enough, leaving only bitterness in its place. That was how it should be. That was what it needed to be for her to make it through. It was all she understood for now.


End file.
